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Overdue Book

Bad PR From the UK. Tessa said: "Luckily, my daughter is the kind of girl who shows me things, but what about other children who may be too worried to show their parents? Or children who may just forget the letter and leave it in their schoolbag?"

She added: "I was really angry at the wording of the letter. My daughter obviously has no means of paying the fine, so I assume as parents they would expect us to pay. However, without a notice sent to us directly, regarding our daughter's fine, how can we be expected to pay or be held liable?"

JET writes "Interesting One From CA: " To have a library fine of $1,505 - the amount Amy N. Smith owes the Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library - requires an uncommon appetite for books or videos, and also a forgetful, crooked or oblivious state of mind.

Smith, of Hayward, said she was "screwed up" - bipolar and without medication - when she borrowed "a ton" of DVDs from the library last year. Now healthy, she said she does not "seem to have them" but will pay her bill.

Her $1,505 debt, having grown at $2 per DVD per day, is more than anyone else owes the library, according to a record the library provided in response to a California Public Records Act request. The database that includes Smith's fine and others changes when someone pays or builds debt. But the day it was produced last month, 32,185 different people owed a total of $626,196.

A News Story from Oklahoma says next week is "National Return Borrowed Book Week".
"Certain books just tend to disappear, like computer books and books on witchcraft."
Tahlequah librarian Lyn Arter agreed some books do seem to be more tempting to book thieves. "The Bible was stolen five times during my first five years here," said Arter. "I guess they'd never read the 'Thou shalt not.'"

Anonymous Patron writes "Stolen book returned after 150 years: An 18th-century legal tome has been returned to the North Carolina state Supreme Court 150 years after it was stolen by a Union soldier after the Civil War. "Report of Divers Cases in Pleas of the Crown Adjudged and Determined; in the Reign of King Charles II" is inscribed by Quentin Busbee, who served as the Supreme Court reporter in 1853, the Raleigh News & Observer reported. The book was published in 1708. The work was donated anonymously to the library of Indiana University. The only clue to its travels from North Carolina to Indiana is an unsigned inscription — "Obtained in July 1865 at Raleigh, North Carolina.""

WCAX - Burlington,VT Reports on that guy who returned his book 60 years late. An upstate New York man has returned a children's book he checked out of a New England library 60 years ago and paid 440 dollars and 16 cents in late charges.

That's 430 dollars and 16 cents more than William Vassily had to pay, since the public library in Portland, Maine caps the fines for late children's books at ten dollars per item.

But the 69-year-old suburban Syracuse man says he paid the extra money in the hope that publicity from his act will motivate people to use libraries, which he calls "a door to the rest of the world."

Anonymous Patron writes "Book checked out for 60 years comes back to library: Thousands of days ago, 9-year-old William Vassily went to the Portland Public Library and took out a book about the adventures of a baby whale.
You can probably guess how this one ends..."

Update: 09/12 17:39 GMT by B:Yes, the book was returned, but the borrower also paid every cent of the late fee (no compounding or adjustment for inflation however)...

Anonymous Patron writes "United Press International: A library book has been returned more than 40 years after it was checked out from a library in central London. The book, "Nostromo" by Joseph Conrad, was mailed to Westminster Council's Paddington Library by someone in Kent...the library had been closed for over twenty years."

Anonymous Patron writes "Evening News 24 In The UK Some books are too good to put down or get back to the library on time, it seems. Libraries say the best-sellers are the ones most often overdue. Bookworms in Norfolk are getting so engrossed in library copies of JK Rowling and Jacqueline Wilson books, they are forgetting to return them on time. JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the book that was most frequently overdue in the county's libraries between July 2005 and July 2006. Readers kept 21 copies of the boy wizard tale beyond their due date."

The Daily Yomiuri - Osaka,Japan - reports Libraries in Kanagawa Prefecture are trying to deal with the problem of having large numbers of their books and other materials stolen, defaced or deliberately damaged by inconsiderate readers.

In Yokohama, 24,147 books were stolen from 18 municipal libraries in fiscal 2005, accounting for nearly 1 percent of the 3.59 million books owned by the libraries.

According to the Yokohama municipal government, the damage in terms of the books' purchase prices amounted to 28.71 million yen. A similar number of books have gone missing annually over the past several years, city officials said.